Patrick Bousquet-Chavanne: leader of year?

A sneak peak at who's in the running to be Marketing Leader of The Year 2017 - we interview Patrick Bousquet-Chavanne, Executive Director Customer, M&S

On your watch the Sparks loyalty scheme has grown five-fold – how is it empowering your relationship with customers? 
When we launched Sparks in 2015 we specifically designed it as a membership club that would redefine our relationship with our most valued customers. Sparks has been transformative for our business, building and solidifying unique relationships. The engagement with the brand is deeper, this reinforces trust in our brand, which further strengthens our customer relationships. It’s a virtuous circle.

What did your earlier career at Estee Lauder teach you about female consumers? 
The beauty industry has always been at the forefront of providing inspiring customer experience. Consumers are now empowered by social networks and the ability to release content 24/7 and social influencers are a formidable force in marketing as they speak with great authenticity.

How are you encouraging your consumers to embrace sustainability?
M&S has a long history of leadership and trust in this space. We have to take our customers with us on our sustainability journey by making it easy for them to get involved. That’s why we have a commitment to build a Plan A attribute (an eco or ethical quality that is above the market norm) into every product we sell by 2020 and currently almost three quarters of our products have one. Why we make it easy for customers to recycle their clothes with Oxfam by having a ‘Shwop Drop’ in every store (27 million items collected and counting) and why we host events like our MacMillan Coffee mornings and Spark Something Good volunteering drives across the UK. Every time a Sparks’ member shops with us and uses their card, we make a donation to one of 10 M&S partner charities of their choice (over £2 million donated since launch).

What does bold marketing leadership look like?
Marketing is the new revenue driver because of the increasing ability through technology to reach and influence consumer-purchasing behaviours. You must have the courage to transform at pace into a multi-disciplinary highly digitalized analytics-driven organization, one that is forensic about developing a common understanding of your consumers and able to rally the entire organisation behind a single view of the customer.

What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever done at work?
It’s about having the courage to do the right thing every day and stand firm on your convictions. Reducing the number of promotions and sales for example is one of the toughest and bravest decisions to make in retail because you are giving up short-term results for long-term brand benefits. In the past year we eliminated a large number of Cyber Days, it was the right thing to do but there were times when we had to hold our nerve.

What’s the hardest part of your job?
Driving short-term results whilst not compromising on long-term innovation, it is about driving revenues along with marketing effectiveness whilst being able to innovate for the mid and long term. We balance today's imperatives with tomorrow’s ambitions which requires greater adaptability in a pretty volatile global retail environment.

What advice would you give others earlier in their career looking to become successful marketing leaders?
Always stay connected to the customers, it's OK to obsess about it, share your vision on how to engage the customers with the organisation at large and don’t be afraid to debate it to secure buy-in because it will make for a more powerful execution when all are aligned behind the vision. Most critically, surround yourself with talented creative and diverse individuals from which you can learn and permanently reinvent yourself.

Looking to the future, what will the marketing department look like in five years’ time?
In five years the Chief Marketing and digital/technology roles will have blended, technology will have had a transformational impact on predictive analytics enabling marketers to anticipate consumer purchasing behaviours and serve relevant, real-time personalised content with much greater accuracy to boost conversion. The marketing department becomes “the connector” within the organisation, digital skills and analytics capabilities are prerequisites and condition success.  

Marketing Leader of Year 2017: voting now closed
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